51 - God : Idea or Experience?
In Sufism

One often confuses God for one's idea of God. Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan.

That the search for a god, or God, has lured civilizations forward in the evolutionary process. One might imagine a cell of our body - for example a blood cell - exploring the body, then making a visual representation of the body of which it is a cell, projecting its idea of beingness upon this larger reality than itself; and more: trying to grasp the thinking of the body, and yet, yet even more: trying to grasp the programming of the body or even more so: the software of the thinking of the body!

We have a need to discover the nature of our relationship with that enigmatic reality that escapes our grasp, which the Upanishad calls "beyond the beyond" and we perceive unqualifiably as the Totality.     

In his book The Unity of Religious Ideals, Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan alludes to the concern of religious leaders from time immemorial, to come forward to answer the quizzical fumblings and phantasies of ponderous minds; sometimes by clumsy ratiocinations. At a scale tantamount to infinity, such inferences could not fail to fall short of the mark within the scope of our finite minds. Yet one may earmark stages in our discovery of our relationship with the Totality.

People would like to know what that paradoxical being looks like. Since one can only imagine something in the likeness of the known - in nature, particularly oneself - the Hindus and the Jews imagined that we are formed in His-Her image. Here our need to complete our representation of ourselves by looking upon ourselves passively, discovering ourselves in the model of ourselves. This view entails a new philosophical equation because, our relationship with that greater reality, rather than being of the nature of that of a fraction to the Totality, like a cell in the body is now seen as that of an exemplar with respect to its template, each fraction carrying the Totality (potentially) within its configuration - which is precisely the holistic paradigm we now encounter in science.

"Those to whom Unity is revealed see the Absolute whole in the parts; yet each is in despair at its particularization from the whole...Behold the world entirely comprised in yourself. The world is a man and man is a world. The heart of a barley seed conceals a hundred harvests" Mahmud Shabistari. Some Sufis - for example the Egyptian Dhul Nun and Baba Farid and the Iranian Baba Kulli express their awe at discovering the divine splendor transpiring through the appearance of the forms of the world. You will notice that God is recognized as that which manifests through the forms rather than seen as actuated in the forms. Here we recognize the impact of Islam that cautions against the idolatry associated with form which one also finds in the Vedantist theory of 'maya'. Abu Yazid Bastami says: "God deceives you in the forms of the world - mere effigies". But the veil of the Muslim lady paradoxically espouses the contours of her countenance and therefore conveys inadvertently a clue to what it conceals, as Farid-ud-Din Attar says.

However our difficulty in believing that we are invested with the inheritance of the many splendored divine qualities in their perfection when grappling with our inadequacies or poor self-image, may be met in the answer to the question: can the template be surmised from a poor or distorted exemplar? The answer is that our mind tends to correct a form to the way that tallies with an inborn sense of orderliness: for example deformed square will be reconstructed in our representation of it to its geometrical integrity. Children naturally fill in the missing parts in incomplete illustrations. Can we not imagine the missing arm of the Venus of Milo? The voice of Caruso can be retrieved from the distortions due to the bad technology of the time when it was recorded, unscathed. The corrected form transpires as it were from behind the apparent form in the likeness of the template.

The same principle applies to what the Sufis call those subtle forms that configure our psyche: qualities. Every quality has its shadow counterpart: we have the defects of our qualities. The shadow of joy may well be facetiousness, of peace, indolence, of mastery, ruthlessness, of truth, callousness, of compassion, indulgence etc. If we know our defects, we may infer our qualities; the qualities transpire through the shadow. One might add: it is the inborn sense of orderliness of our ultimate faculty: pure intelligence (proto-critic) that espies the template or software because this faculty is of the nature of the thinking of the universe. In fact this is where the divine mind lies latent surreptitiously within us, if we can only discern it.

In fact one may look upon the bountiful legacy of creative thinking on Planet Earth as the brainstorming of the collective mind of that Total Being that is the Universe proliferating and thereby limited, funneled in the form of what appears to be the minds of humans that has fashioned all the beauty of our civilizations in art, crafts, architecture, music, poetry theater, dance, ritual etc. At this junction a new realization dawns upon the Sufi - a total reversal of the outlook of the cell seeking to grasp the whole body (or the thinking of the body); the Sufi now apprehends that it is the whole body in our previous analogy that is gaining a further outlook upon itself by seeing itself through the vantage point of the cell, while the cell discovers itself through the consciousness of the whole body.  "By contemplating us, He contemplates Himself and by contemplating Him, we contemplate ourselves". Ibn 'Arabi. 

But there is a further stage that the Sufi reaches: he sees himself through the eyes of God. "The knowledge gained by grasping in oneself the divine archetype is only the first degree; the second is knowing oneself through the knowledge that God has of Himself through you." "God discovers His perfection through man's limitation" Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. Borrowing the divine glance, we discover the divine qualities invested in us in their pristine perfection through their imperfect actualization in our personality.

However Abu Yazid Bastami soon realized that to grasp the model of which the exemplar lies dormant in his own personality, he had to actualize in his personality the prototype of these qualities latent within him.  "By actualizing the divine nature which is the ground of one's personality, one confers upon God a mode of knowing" (Ibn 'Arabi). This is exactly what the Sufi practice of the wazaif is about. The sculptor discovers his/her statue in the course of making it.

Pir-o-Murshid says: the concept of God is the stepping-stone, but be clear about the difference between believing in God and experiencing God. After espying "the hand of God behind all things", one meeds to "awaken God dormant in one's being". The discovery of the hall-mark of that Being that is the Totality begging to be awakened in one's psyche is awe-inspiring - can alter one's life. Bastami was so overwhelmed when he realized this that he said: How great is my glory! How can one say this if one means one's personality rather than that which is trying to come through?

The next step beyond the discovery of the relationship: model/exemplar consists in discovering a relationship in the nature of the covenant of allegiance or fealty of the knights of all times and civilizations with their lord. Hence the reference to God as the Lord. Incidentally, there must be a tacit covenant of sorts between the DNA of our cells and the RNA of conformation to the sovereign code governing the body, the violation of which spells cancer.

Indeed the programing of our bodies provides for the correction of mistakes in replication thanks to the fine-tuning operation of enzymes. The relevance of our human status as Viceregents becomes the more impelling the more one feels the need to dedicate oneself to a purpose beyond one's own well-being - in other words in service. Hence the reference to a Covenant in the Old and New Testament and Qur'an, but particularly the Iranian Zoroastrian tradition of Espahbad, the knighthood and that of the magi-kings which was perpetrated by Sufism.

Our personalities are linked with the divine nature in a relationship of suzerainty by whose observance we ensure the divine governance on earth.  "By recognizing God's sovereignty, I constitute him as Lord" Sahl Tostari. Eventually the qualities of the sovereign are passed on to the vassal. 

Thou playest this game of Thou and I that at the end all I's will realize the oneness of I.  Rumi

A few dervishes are carried in the course of their inner itinerary by their awe at discovering themselves as being part of the one and only Being which includes the galaxies, the angels, the divine archetypes and the divine thinking, and their bewonderment at the traces of the splendor transpiring at every level of reality into a state where in the consternation of the mind, the act of cognizance pales - in fact collapses - in the magic of ecstasy (hal) - the rapture of the mystic echoing the divine nostalgia (ishq) which now avers itself to be the motivating springhead behind the whole process of existence, rather than the wish of God to discover Oneself in another oneself.
